obliviondoll: Not quite Valve level of abusive
AngryAlien: After 19 years of using Steam and still having many gripes with Valve/Steam, I could at least kinda make my peace with them.
After almost 4 years of having the company not just refusing to fix a service-breaking issue but actively being abusive toward affected customers, I'm well past the point of no longer willing to give them a chance to make peace unless they go REALLY out of their way to do more than just fix the issue. If there is ANY other option than Steam to play games through, I'll actively recommend people buy elsewhere over supporting Valve. When looking at new games, if it's only available on Steam, I won't buy it, and that will continue even if they fix the reason it wouldn't result in me getting to play the game anyway.
The client actually works, it has a lot of functions that are actually useful or which I can at least hide or ignore. The client allows me to download my games at an actually decent speed, also, it runs stable, shows no crashes and does not hog lots of CPU power and memory just by running in the background doing nothing. Also, so far I never had problems with the support, which was always and actually, you know, supportiv. I really can't see any abuse here, but maybe you want to elaborate.
"The client actually works" - apart from the fact that it was confirmed near the end of 2019 to be causing harm to some users with migraines and epilepsy, and across the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, was found to be affecting users with a few less severe conditions as well. Recent updates have also been severely impacting the "not hog system resources" claim as well, from what I've seen. And this ties into...
GOG and Galaxy on the other hand have increasingly shown to be a bloody joke over the last years. Galaxy is a hot mess in more than one regard and I've actually have caught myself not playing games simply because of this dumbster fire.
I've had plenty of issues with GOG as well, and most of them revolve around the horrific mess that is Galaxy 2.0 and their refusal to provide support for the objsectively-better (by which I mean actually functional) 1.2 version. That said, there are 2 MASSIVE points in GOG's favour which make this far less of an issue than Steam's problems. GOG Galaxy 1.2 is still downloadable directly from GOG servers, and fairly simple user-side edits allow the prevention of it auto-updating to Galaxy 2.0 and becoming a mess. But more importantly, you don't even need a client app, if they ever do stop allowing 1.2 to connect to their network, you'll still be able to download your games from GOG without using it. Updating is more complex that way, but the fact that the option exists is a safety net that Steam doesn't have. If you have issues, such as the Steam client having been a confirmed health risk for almost 4 years and counting, Valve don't give you anything like an adequate solution to work around the problem, and have by contrast taken steps to actively disable workarounds involving the use of older client versions to try and circumvent the harm caused by the use of an up-to-date client.
When I catch myself time and again that I not play a game because it's connected with GOG and the Galaxy client, something is very, VERY wrong and messed up. In fact and as I see it, Steam might not be the best thing that ever happened to gaming, but at least it offers great functionality, an overall good support and, most important, decent download rates - all things that I can't say about GOG and Galaxy anymore for a looong time now.
There was a time where there were legitimate reasons to argue that Steam was a huge boon to gamers, and was a major positive influence in the gaming market as a whole. That time is, unfortunately, long past. I'm not arguing "GOG is good, Steam is bad" here, not at all. I'm arguing "GOG is pretty bad, but at least it's not quite as bad as Steam" because I haven't seen GOG's support staff try and coerce a customer into self-harm, but I can't say the same for Steam.
GOG is actually bad enough that I've moved most of my wishlist and been actively buying games on Epic instead recently, and given what they've done, that should tell you a lot about my opinion of GOG these days... and defending them by comparison with Steam should tell you even more about just how bad Valve's conduct has been (I'm aware of at least 3 countries which have legal investigations of Valve in progress in some form because of these issues, very slow process unfortunately but it's happening).